Network Working Group M. Mealling Internet-Draft VeriSign, Inc. Expires: October 10, 2003 April 11, 2003 A URN Namespace For The Liberty Alliance Project draft-mealling-liberty-urn-00.txt Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 except that the right to produce derivative works is not granted. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http:// www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on October 10, 2003. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document describes a URN namespace that will identify various objects within the Liberty Architecture for federated network identity. 1. Introduction The Liberty Architecture seeks to provide federated network identity in such a way that enhances security, privacy and trust; thus creating a networked world across which individuals and businesses can engage in virtually any transaction without compromising the privacy and security of vital identity information. Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 1] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 One fundamental component of this architecture is its use of XML [4], and specifically, XML Schema [6] and Namespaces [5]. These components require identifiers that will live far beyond the lifetime of the organization that produced them. As such, a URN namespace for those components that adheres to the assumptions and policies of the Liberty specification is required. This namespace specification is for a formal namespace. 2. Specification Template Namespace ID: "liberty" requested. Registration Information: Registration Version Number: 1 Registration Date: 2003-04-01 Declared registrant of the namespace: Liberty Alliance Project c/o IEEE-ISTO 445 Hoes Lane Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331, USA info@projectliberty.org Declaration of structure: The Namespace Specific Strings (NSS) of all URNs assigned by Liberty will conform to the syntax defined in section 2.2 of RFC2141 [1]. In addition, all Liberty URN NSSs will consist of a left-to-right series of tokens delimited by colons. The left-to-right sequence of colon-delimited tokens corresponds to descending nodes in a tree. To the right of the lowest naming Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 2] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 authority node there may be zero, one or more levels of hierarchical (although not in the RFC 2396 [3] sense of 'hierarchy') naming nodes terminating in a rightmost leaf node. See the section entitled "Identifier assignment" below for more on the semantics of NSSs. This syntax convention is captured in the following normative ABNF [2] rules for Liberty NSSs: Liberty-NSS = 1*(subStChar) 0*(":" 1*(subStChar)) subStChar = trans / "%" HEXDIG HEXDIG trans = ALPHA / DIGIT / other / reserved other = "(" / ")" / "+" / "," / "-" / "." / "=" / "@" / ";" / "$" / "_" / "!" / "*" / "'" reserved = "%" / "/" / "?" / "#" The exclusion of the colon from the list of "other" characters means that the colon can only occur as a delimiter between string tokens. Note that this ABNF rule set guarantees that any valid Liberty NSS is also a valid RFC2141 NSS. For example: urn:liberty:schemas:authctx:2002:05 urn:liberty:schemas:core:2002:12 Relevant ancillary documentation: Liberty Architecture Overview [7] Version 1.1 Liberty Alliance Project January 15, 2003 Identifier uniqueness considerations: Identifiers are assigned by the Liberty Project within its various standards. In the process of publishing a specification all newly minted names are checked against the record of previously assigned names. Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 3] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 Identifier persistence considerations: The assignment process guarantees that names are not reassigned and that the binding between the name and and its resource is permanent, regardless of any standards or organizational changes. Process of identifier assignment: Names are assigned by the Liberty standards publication process. Process of identifier resolution: At this time no resolution mechanism is specified. Rules for Lexical Equivalence: The entire URN is case-insensitive. Conformance with URN Syntax: There are no additional characters reserved. Validation mechanism: None other than verifying with the correct Liberty specifications. Scope: Global Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 4] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 3. IANA Considerations This document includes a URN Namespace registration that is to be entered into the IANA registry for URN NIDs. 4. Community Considerations While there is no resolution mechanism for this namespace, the names themselves are used in public implementations of the Liberty specifications. There are circumstances where objects from the Liberty system will become exposed to the general Internet. In these cases the use of the Liberty namespace will provide general interoperability benefits to the Internet at large. Additionally, there may be subcomponents of the Liberty specifications that may be adopted by other standards, in which case the URNs used to identify those components and specifications can be easily used to enhance other, non-Liberty based, systems. 5. Security Considerations Since there is no defined resolution mechanism for Liberty URNs it is difficult to authenticate the fact that a given namespace actually adheres to the standard, thus applications should be be careful to not take some unverified sources assertion that what it is sending adheres to what the actual URN is assigned to. References [1] Moats, R., "URN Syntax", RFC 2141, May 1997. [2] Crocker, D. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF", RFC 2234, November 1997. [3] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R. and L. Masinter, "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", RFC 2396, August 1998. [4] Bray, T., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, C. and E. Maler, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (2nd ed)", W3C REC-xml, October 2000, . [5] Bray, T., Hollander, D. and A. Layman, "Namespaces in XML", W3C REC-xml-names, January 1999, . [6] Thompson, H., Beech, D., Maloney, M. and N. Mendelsohn, "XML Schema Part 1: Structures", W3C REC-xmlschema-1, May 2001, . Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 5] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 [7] Hodges, J. and T. Watson, "Liberty Architecture Overview", Liberty 1.1, January 2003, . Author's Address Michael Mealling VeriSign, Inc. 21345 Ridgetop Circle Dulles, VA 20166 US Phone: +1 678 581 9656 EMail: michael@neonym.net URI: http://www.verisignlabs.com Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 6] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. Information on the IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and standards-related documentation can be found in BCP-11. 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This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 7] Internet-Draft The Liberty URN Namespace April 2003 HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Acknowledgement Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the Internet Society. Mealling Expires October 10, 2003 [Page 8]